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Does Your Brand Tell Lies?

Speaking of orange juice, I completely forgot about this little gem of an article that came out of the Boston Globe two months ago and culminated in a significant change in behavior for my family.  After reading it you may join me in pondering how exactly Tropicana intends to respond to this disaster that will likely descend on them in about 60 days once this baby hits the morning news circuit.

The article is a Q&A with Alissa Hamilton, a Woodcock Foundation Food & Society Policy Fellow, discussing her forthcoming book, “Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice.”

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Let me just cut to the pulpy core of the issue: practically every carton of “not-from concentrate” orange juice you could pick up in the refrigerated section of your local grocery is NOT what you think it is.

As Ms. Hamilton states,

It’s a heavily processed product. It’s heavily engineered as well. In the process of pasteurizing, juice is heated and stripped of oxygen, a process called deaeration, so it doesn’t oxidize. Then it’s put in huge storage tanks where it can be kept for upwards of a year. It gets stripped of flavor-providing chemicals, which are volatile. When it’s ready for packaging, companies such as Tropicana hire flavor companies such as Firmenich to engineer flavor packs to make it taste fresh. People think not-from-concentrate is a fresher product, but it also sits in storage for quite a long time.

Sitting in a metal vat for a year = freshly squeezed? Right, that’s what you’re drinking.  Not something that was freshly picked from the grove, squeezed and then rushed to your grocer in a matter of a few days.  Even though that is what they would like you to think and for which they expect you to pay a mighty premium.

Until February of this year, my family of 5 were loyal purchasers of the 4 pack of 64 oz Tropicana Premium from Costco and paid something like $4 a carton for what we thought was a close approximation to fresh squeezed juice. Give or take a couple of weeks.  I mean, look at the side of the carton where they romanticize the freshly delivered juice that is rushed up the Eastern seaboard from the grove to big cities in the refrigerated Tropicana Juice Train.

Is there any reason to believe there won’t be a huge outcry when consumers learn what they’re actually drinking is not fresh juice taste but a manufactured simulacrum of it? And that even worse, more and more of that juice is not fresh from Florida but instead shipped from Brazil?  At that point, the damage done by Mr. Arnell’s ill considered packaging refresh will be a tempest in a teacup compared to the response to Ms. Hamilton’s book explaining how inauthentic Tropicana’s pretty little cartons of juice really are.  Then Mr. Arnell can add yet another definition to what the phrase “squeeze” means in the minds of Americans today.

What change did the Breillatt household make, you ask?  We decided to go with the best tasting frozen juice we could find since it’s half the price of “not-from concentrate” and essentially the same except you’re not paying for shipping water and the more expensive manufacturing process. Plus you can determine how “juicy” you want your juice by reducing the amount of water you add. Costco has a 6 pack of their Kirkland brand that is actually really good.  And when we want that truly freshly squeezed taste?  Occasionally we’ll squeeze our own oranges to get nothing but juice.

What’s the lesson from this story?  It’s yet to be certain how much of a hit Tropicana and other juices like Florida’s Natural, Simply Orange, and even Minute Maid will take from this revelation.  But if they learned anything from the high fructose corn syrup debate, I’m sure they’ll be lining up their brightest PR stars to attempt to make this story go away.

The better answer though is to be truthful with your consumers.  In this era where their trust has been battered in multiple areas of our life, consumers are increasingly showing loyalty to brands that stay true to their promises.  There really is something to the maxim “authenticity speaks for itself.”

[Update] Seth Godin nails the authenticity trend with his brief post, “What you say, what you do and who you are.”

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What Do Your Customers Know About Cool?

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. Edgar Degas

If you’ve ever found yourself working for a start-up or really small company – I’m talking less than 15 employees – then you’ve no doubt encountered the siren song filled dreams of a mammoth sized marketing budget.

“If only we were like P&G or Apple or Accenture,” the song goes, “with six, seven, yes even eight figure R&D and marketing budgets…we could blast our message on billboards and in every Google Ad possible…starlets would preen around our product in every episode of the best shows on Must See TV…we would have access to all of the research ever generated about our target customer and I could quit guessing when the CEO asks me what is the right next step….Man, our brand would be ubiquitous…customers across the country, even around the world would know how amazing our products are and…we would be inundated with sales…because they would love us.”

Yes, it would be amazing wouldn’t it Virginia?  But be careful because as the Bible says, “where much is given, much is expected.”  It’s enticing to believe that all of the money in the world would provide you with the absolutely complete and perfect understanding of your target consumers.  Your war room would be filled with books (OK well not books but given the thunk factor of those PowerPoint decks when printed and dropped on the board room table, they might as well be) carefully crafted by only the best consultants detailing everything you never even dreamed you wanted to know about the habits of your customer.  You would have hours of candid video footage which you would spend hours studying the minute details of freeze frames like Phil Jackson preparing for the big game.  The best designers would be on speed dial and shower you with their most brilliant and most modern concepts.

Sounds like nirvana, right?

And yet, if that is what a massive marketing budget can provide, then what in the world happened to those poor schlubs over at Tropicana who arguably own the concept of fresh squeezed orange juice?

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As Grant McCracken, pop cultural anthropoligist extraordinaire, explains, they were swayed by everything money could provide: the glitz AND the glamour! Those entrusted with this sacred brand allowed a so-called guru with the hippest eyewear you ever saw, run their brand right off the cliff.

What, you mean the iconic mouthwatering orange with the straw in it is so fraught with meaning that abandoning it for a sterile, generic looking, impossible to distinguish from the cheapest watered down so-called orange juice sitting at the bottom of the shelf package, would actually lead to a 20% decline in revenues in the critical first 3 months after launch?  As our good friends over at Calculated Risk like to say, “Hoocoodanode??!”  It’s amusing that Tropicana’s initial response to the flat-lined launch was that complaints came from a loyal vocal minority.  A vocal minority?  REALLY?  You lose $33 million in revenues on top of a failed $35 million packaging redesign / launch campaign and you say a vocal minority caused you to stand up and pay attention?  Sounds more like a full scale revolt of a significant portion of your customer base.

McCracken pulls no punches in his cutting critique of Peter Arnell – the so-called guru – and Massimo D’Amore, the Tropicana executive who sponsored the whole debacle.  And Arnell’s response demonstrates an over-engineered thinking that only the brightest minds could produce.  Consumers know what the juice looks like, Peter, the key is making them think they’re about to drink straight from the orange.  No one I know could ever have imagined that they were freshly squeezing the juice by rotating your little orange cap.  Talk about artifice.

The lesson from this story my friends is that no matter how large your budget, if you don’t ask the right people the right questions, you can expect similar results.  And in corollary, the larger your budgetary spend, the more likely your spectacular failure will go down as a Harvard Business School case study of what not to do.

So remember, as one entrusted with a product brand story, you are an artist and your product is destined for the masses – your customers – so if you’re going to entrust your art to some guru, make sure they go out and talk to those same masses and actually LISTEN TO THEM.  In fact, in today’s world of Social Media, for a lot less than what Arnell costs, you can learn more just by dipping your toes in conversations flowing around your brands each day.  Why not strike up a conversation and see where it leads.  Because while those same masses may not know art, they absolutely know what they like:

The public is the tribunal before which all art is judged – not the critics or the academies. The public is the artist’s only patron, and has certain fundamental rights. It will submit to education, and will respond to suggestion, but it will not be bullied. Walter J. Phillips

And to those iconoclastic designers out there who hold themselves above the masses?  I can only say that mediocrity requires aloofness to preserve its dignity.

Next to come, an exploration of why competitors fail to act on customer opportunities in categories clearly demonstrating strong growth and significant innovation.